robheaton.co.uk

As of today, I am the proud owner of an Iyonix computer. This is a very quick machine, quicker than the Beagle Board. (Or so it seems!)
This means I now own 13 machines capable of running RISC OS Plus I have my eye on machine number 14!

Well here we are in January again, as I do every January, I decide to start blogging again!

As usual, since my last post waaay back last year, lots of things have changed!
The Arduino tinkering worked out very well & I created some wacky projects, sadly nothing that will make me millions of pounds!

My latest interest is the Beagle Board I’m currently running RISC OS Open on it. Over the past year RISC OS Open has become more & more usable on the Beagle, just yesterday the audio drivers were released, so now the Beagle barks!

Jake turned 3 back in October, and has just started nursery. Although he tells me that nursery is hard!
My lovely wife is fine & dandy yet currently addicted to the Sims 3.

And me?
Surrounded by technology with a coffee in my hand!

My Arduino beginners kit finally arrived! So that’s my evenings entertainment sorted!!
If anyone out there needs some Arduino kit, or components, check out this site earthshinedesign.co.uk. They offer fantastic customer service, and rock bottom prices!

I’ll update later with some news on how the kit works out!

Just had the confirmation Email from tinker.it that my Arduino starter kit has shipped, hopefully it will arrive tomorrow! I also picked Andy up a starter kit at a rock bottom price! So now he can build his EMF meter to look for ghosts!!!

Okay, so no sign of my Arduino board, but I did upgrade to the recently released iPhone OS 3.0, so far everything is fine, and I took the opportunity to change all the music of my phone.

Also my Arduino Ethernet shield & LCD shield arrived!
If only I had something to plug them into…….

Hopefully my Arduino kit will be dispatched tomorrow, been doing a lot of reading and I have a few ideas for projects. Youtube also seems to offer a wealth of information. (I always thought Youtube was for videos of farts and other horridness!)

I did secretly hope I would come home and it would be waiting for me today, even though the website says it won’t be dispatched until tomorrow!!!! Although I did come home and found me xxxx beer kit waiting for me!

Yes I know It’s been all quiet on the blogging front for quite some time!

Many things have changed, new house, new phone, new laptop, new toys galore….

My latest toy is an Arduino board. I first discovered them almost two and a half years ago. (According to my bookmarks on Del.ico.us) However I never ventured any further than just reading about them.
Then after a recent MSN conversation with my good friend Dave, I decided it was time!

I’ll post some more info on this, once the board arrives, should be a few days away though, as it’s a new revision of the Arduino board, and nowhere has stock.

Stay Tuned!….

I have to say, the Debian team (Or should I say the GNU community!) have out done themselves, Debians latest offering is by far the most user friendly version i’ve used.

After using the latest testing release for about 5 hours last night, I’m now downloading the latest stable release (v4r3) to setup a LAMP server.

As for the title “development makes jack a dull boy??” per haps it should have read “development makes Linux more user friendly!”

Well I figure I must be time for my yearly encounter with Debian Linux, it seems every year I devote an afternoon to installing and working with Debian.

I’ve downloaded the weekly testing DVD set, now it’s time to fire it up on a virtual machine, and dive back into manually configuring hardware! Wohooooo!

I’m sure this will tickle someone out there, after weeks of messing with the webcam on me eee on Ubuntu, i found it was disabled in the BIOS!!!!

Once i enabled it, Skype picked it up straight away!
I have to say, i certainly don’t remember disabling it, but hey ho it works!

(If anyone else has problems with the webcam, you also need to disable “desktop effects”

Now, what else can i play with…….